Section:GDN 1J PaGe:10 Edition Date:190815 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 14/8/2019 17:54 cYanmaGentaYellowbl
- The Guardian Thursday 15 Aug ust 2019
10
The fate of every
language in the world
has been lamented by
its speakers at some
point or another
he 21st century
seems to present us with an ever-lengthening list of
perils: climate crisis, fi nancial meltdown, cyber-attacks.
Should we stock up on canned foods in case the ATMs
snap shut? Buy a shedload of bottled water? Hoard
prescription medicines? The prospect of everything that
makes modern life possible being taken away from us is
terrifying. We would be plunged back into the middle
ages, but without the skills to cope.
Now imagine that something even more fundamental
than electricity or money is at risk: a tool we have relied
on since the dawn of human history, enabling the very
foundations of civilisation to be laid. I’m talking about
our ability to communicate – to put our thoughts into
words, and to use those words to forge bonds, to deliver
vital information, to learn from our mistakes and build
on the work done by others.
The doomsayers admit that this apocalypse may take
some time – years, or decades, even – to unfold. But the
direction of travel is clear. As things stand, it is left to a
few heroic individuals to raise their voices in warning
about the dangers of doing nothing to stave off this
threat. “There is a worrying trend of adults mimicking
teen-speak. They are using slang words and ignoring
grammar,” Marie Clair, of the Plain English Campaign ,
told the Daily Mail. “Their language is deteriorating.
They are lowering the bar. Our language is fl ying off at
all tangents, without the anchor of a solid foundation.”
The Queen’s English Society , a British organisation,
has long been fi ghting to prevent this decline. Alt hough
it is at pains to point out that it does not believe
language can be preserved unchanged, it worries that
communication is at risk of becoming far less eff ective.
“Some changes would be wholly unacceptable, as
they would cause confusion and the language would
lose shades of meaning, ” the society says on its website.
With a reduced expressive capacity, it seems likely
that research, innovation and the quality of public
discourse would suff er. The columnist Douglas
Rushkoff put it like this in a 2013 New York Times
opinion piece : “Without grammar, we lose the agreed-
upon standards about what means what. We lose the
ability to communicate when respondents are not
actually in the same room speaking to one another.
Without grammar, we lose the precision required to
be eff ective and purposeful in writing. ”
At the same time, our laziness and imprecision are
leading to unnecessary bloating of the language –
“language obesity ,” as the British broadcaster John
Humphrys has described it. This is, he said, “ the
consequence of feeding on junk words. Tautology is
the equivalent of having chips with rice. We talk of
future plans and past history; of live survivors and
safe havens. Children have temper tantrums and
politicians announce ‘new initiatives’. ”
It is frightening to think where all this might lead.
If English is in such a bad state now, what will things
be like in a generation’s time? We must surely act
before it is too late.But there is something perplexing about claims like
this. By their nature, they imply that we were smarter
and more precise in the past. Seventy-odd years ago,
people knew their grammar and knew how to talkclearly. And, if we follow the logic, they must also
have been better at organising, fi nding things out
and making things work.
John Humphrys was born in 1943. Since then, the
English-speaking world has grown more prosperous,
better educated and more effi ciently governed, despite
an increase in population. Most democratic freedoms
have been preserved and intellectual achievement
intensifi ed. Linguistic decline is the cultural equivalent
of the boy who cried wolf, except the wolf never turns
up. Perhaps this is why, even though the idea that
language is going to the dogs is widespread, nothing
much has been done to mitigate it: it’s a powerful
intuition, but the evidence of its eff ects has simply never
materialised. That is because it is unscientifi c nonsense.
There is no such thing as linguistic decline, so far
as the expressive capacity of the spoken or written
word is concerned. We need not fear a breakdown in
communication. Our language will always be as fl exible
and sophisticated as it has been up to now. Those who
warn about the deterioration of English haven’t learned
about the history of the language, and don’t understand
the nature of their own complaints – which are simply
statements of preference for the way of doing things they
have become used to. The erosion of language to the
point that “ultimately, no doubt, we shall communicate
with a series of grunts” (Humphrys again) will not,
cannot, happen. The clearest evidence for this is that
warnings about the deterioration of English have been
around for a very long time.
In 1785, a few years after the fi rst volume of Edward
Gibbon ’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire had been published, things were so bad
that the poet and philosopher James Beattie declared:
“Our language (I mean the English) is degenerating very
fast. ” Some 70 years before that, Jonathan Swift had
issued a similar warning. In a letter to Robert, Earl of
Oxford, he complained: “From the Civil War to this
present Time, I am apt to doubt whether the Corruptions
in our Language have not at least equalled the
Refi nements of it ... most of the Books we see now
a-days, are full of those Manglings and Abbreviations.
Instances of this Abuse are innumerable: What does
Your Lordship think of the Words, Drudg’d, Disturb’d,
Rebuk’t, Fledg’d, and a thousand others, every where
to be met in Prose as well as Verse?”
Swift would presumably have thought The History of
the Decline and Fall, revered as a masterpiece today, was
a bit of a mess. He knew when the golden age of English
was: “The Period wherein the English Tongue received
most Improvement, I take to commence with the
beginning of Queen Elizabeth’s Reign, and to conclude
with the Great Rebellion in [Sixteen] Forty Two.”
But the problem is that writers at that time also felt
they were speaking a degraded, faltering tongue. In
The Arte of English Poesie , published in 1589, the critic
George Puttenham fretted about the importation of
new, foreign words – “strange terms of other languages ...
and many dark words and not usual nor well sounding,
though they be daily spoken in Court. ” That was halfway
through Swift’s golden age. Just before it, in the reign of
Elizabeth’s sister, Mary, the Cambridge professor John
Cheke wrote with anxiety that “Our own tongue should
be written clean and pure, unmixed and unmangled
with borrowing of other tongues. ”
This concern for purity – and the need to take a stand
against a rising tide of corruption – goes back even
further. In the 14th century, Ranul f Higden complained
about the state English was in. His words, quoted in
David Crystal’s The Stories of English , were translated
from the Latin by a near-contemporary, John Trevisa:
“By intermingling and mixing, fi rst with Danes and
afterwards with Normans, in many people the language
of the land is harmed, and some use strange inarticulate
utterance, chattering, snarling, and harsh
teeth-gnashing. ”
That’s fi ve writers, across a span of 400 years, all
moaning about the same erosion of standards. And yet
the period also encompasses some of the greatest
works of English literature.
It’s worth pausing here to take a closer look at
Trevisa’s translation, for the sentence I’ve reproduced is
a version in modern English. The original is as follows:“By commyxstion and mellyng furst wiþ danes and
afterward wiþ Normans in menye þe contray longage ys
apeyred, and som vseþ strange wlaff yng, chyteryng,
harrying and garryng, grisbittyng. ”
For those who worry about language deteriorating,
proper usage is best exemplifi ed by the speech and
writing of a generation or so before their own. The logical
conclusion is that the generation or two before that
would be even better, the one before that even more so.
As a result, we should fi nd Trevisa’s language vastly
more refi ned, more correct, more clear and more
eff ective. The problem is, we can’t even read it.
Hand-wringing about standards is n ot restricted
to English. The fate of every language in the world
has been lamented by its speakers at some point or
another. In the 13th century, the Arabic lexicographer
Ibn Manzur described himself as a linguistic Noah –
ushering words into a protective ark in order that
they might survive the onslaught of laziness. Elias
Muhanna , a professor of comparative literature,
describes one of Manzur’s modern-day counterparts:
“ Fi’l Amr , a language-advocacy group [in Lebanon],
has launched a campaign to raise awareness about
Arabic’s critical condition by staging mock crime
scenes around Beirut depicting “murdered” Arabic
letters, surrounded by yellow police tape that reads:
‘Don’t kill your language.’”
The linguist Rudi Keller gives similar examples from
Germany. “Hardly a week goes by, ” he writes, “in which
some reader of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
doesn’t write a letter to the editor expressing fear for
the future of the German language. ” As Keller puts it:
“F or more than 2,000 years, complaints about the
decay of respective languages have been documented
in literature, but no one has yet been able to name an
example of a ‘decayed language ’. ” He has a point.
The hard truth is that English, like all other languages,
is constantly evolving. It is the speed of the change,
within our own short lives, that creates the illusion of
decline. Because change is often generational, older
speakers recognise that the norms they grew up with
are falling away, replaced with new ones they are n ot
as comfortable using. This cognitive diffi culty doesn’t
feel good, and the bad feelings are translated into
criticism and complaint. We tend to fi nd intellectual
justifi cations for our personal preferences, whatever
their motivation. If we lived for hundreds of years, we
would be able to see the bigger picture. Because when
you zoom out, you can appreciate that language change
is n ot just a question of slovenliness: it happens at every
level, from the superfi cial to the structural.
Any given language is signifi cantly reconfi gured
over the centuries, to the extent that it becomes
totally unrecognisable. But, as with complex systems in
the natural world, there is often a kind of homeostasis:
simplifi cation in one area can lead to greater complexity
in another. What stays the same is the expressive
capacity of the language. You can always say what
needs to be said.Frequently, these changes are unexpected and reveal-
ing. They shed light on the workings of our minds,
mouths and culture. One common driver of linguistic
change is a process called reanalysis. This can happen
when a language is learned for the fi rst time, when
babies begin to talk and construe what they hear slightly
diff erently from their parents. In the abstract, it sounds
complex but, in fact, it is straightforward: when a word or
sentence has a structural ambiguity, what we hear could
be an instance of A, but it could also be an instance of B.
For years, A has held sway, but suddenly B catches on –T
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